Cruddy - Lynda Barry [67]
A blue smoke ring drifted upwards and broke apart.
“It sure as shit ain’t cattle. Only man working here is that goddamned Alice the Goon on the meat saw. The stock out there in the feed pen are mostly culls and there’s but a handful of them. Stack of bills six inches high with a rubber band around it and one just like it underneath. Got any ideas, Clyde?”
Later that afternoon I was sitting on the trailer step looking at my finger. It was throbbing and looking very swollen. My fingernail was lifting away at the sides and the cut itself was a wet yellow-green. Fernst stepped out the back door with a candy bar, unwrapped it, and paced while he ate it, making soft hooo-hooo noises.
A truck pulled up driven by a man with very bad skin and a very purple nose. Fernst shoved down the end of his candy bar and hopped up the back-door steps. The truck man did some steering wheel maneuvers and backed up almost right against the door. It was a refrigerator truck but old and dented with rust stripes running down the sides. The man got out and opened up the back and set a ramp from the truck bed to the back door. Gagger smells emanated instantly.
He was wearing grime-shiny pants and flies swirled around him. When he stopped moving they crawled on his face and he didn’t brush them away. This was Mom. This was the rendering plant man. He looked over at me. He said, “You Clyde?”
I didn’t move.
He said, “I heard about you, Clyde.”
The open back door blocked my view but there was the sound like a dolly or wheelbarrow rolling. Rolling in and rolling out and rolling back again. Then Mom pulled in the ramp, shut the back door, and Fernst jumped in the cab with him. They drove a short distance to the cull pile and the ramp came back out and they loaded culls. The truck drove away.
The father was right about no one coming to the Knocking Hammer lounge at night. The old men came in the afternoon as usual, but they left before dark. That night the sheriff showed up with dinner, Chinese food from the next town. It was cold by the time he set it on the bar, but I ate it gratefully. Pammy and the father also wolfed. The sheriff said, “Pammy, why do you make Eegore sit on the goddamned floor to eat?”
“Hey,” said the father. “It’s her place.”
Pammy’s fungus smile shot some spores his way.
She’d taken a break from her chomping to pull out a ladder and hang a few more rolls of flypaper. Black dried-out exoskeletons cascaded wherever she bumped, coming off at the legs. A couple bounced off the bar but no one seemed to mind. The father especially. I’ve seen him keep drinking with one swimming in his glass. Once when I said something about it, he said, “Butt out, Clyde. This is between me and the fly.”
The sheriff said, “You know, I have connections with a private institution that takes Ee-gore’s type.”
“The Home,” said Pammy. “Call it The Home. It don’t sound so bad.”
“Vocational training,” said the sheriff. “Fernst is fostered out from there. You never seen anyone better on the meat saw.”
“Fostered?” said the father.
The sheriff explained that it was like taking care of a foster child only it was a foster spooker.
“Don’t call him that,” said Pammy. “Don’t use that word.”
Spooker was another word for mongoloid. As far as the sheriff could tell, I was one. Pammy thought so too. And they were telling the father about the great spooker home just up the way, just outside of the town where the sheriff picked up the Chinese food.
“It’s real nice,” said the sheriff. “Hell, they live better than most of us and they learn a trade at the same time.”
When the father asked what kind of trade, the sheriff said, “By-product processing.”
The father asked, “By-products of what?